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I once reported a group created solely to harass & defame my FB friend. The creator of the group clearly violated multiple Facebook policies, 3.3 You will not b

I once reported a group created solely to harass & defame my FB friend. The creator of the group clearly violated multiple Facebook policies, 3.3 You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user, 3.9 You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory, 5.1 You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else's rights or otherwise violates the law. Facebook reaction? They found it doesn’t violate their community standards: http://const.me/tmp/fb-policy.jpg http://const.me/tmp/fb-policy.jpg Right, “no place for hate speech”.

abawany 9y ago
Facebook made it deliberately difficult and obfuscated to report violations as well. Twitter by comparison makes it relatively frictionless. I don't use Facebook except to follow some news sources but I now follow them on Twitter and barely use Facebook. I know one is supposed to assume incompetence where malice is seen but gosh, I can't decide where Facebook falls yet.
- m52go 9y ago
  I think the point the parent is making is that standards are being applied unevenly. On Twitter, for example, there are a host of accounts that have been banned for seemingly harmless activity while other accounts with much more serious issues remain active. Despite it being easier to report violations on Twitter (taking your word for it...I have no personal experience), standards aren't being applied fairly. That undermines the whole point of standards.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  Facebook is notorious from both ends of this, it seems. I've had a Facebook marketplace post taken down with no explanation other than a copy of the guidelines, I appealed, and now my marketplace posts simply don't get seen by other people, even if they search for them. I've had a friend's account get suspended for a meme that pissed some people off, while a legit neo-Nazi group that had Swastikas on the page I had reported months earlier for making comments about the extinction of the pure white race was still up. It seems they only police enough to claim they do. They don't actually do much that anyone is happy with.
  - tim333 9y ago
    You'd think something like a simple downvote button that lowers the probability of the post being seen would kinda work.
    - TallGuyShort 9y ago
      I would think that's ripe for abuse. For curating my personal feed, I've been fairly content to unfollow people I want to remain friends with and hide posts shared from specific accounts. I don't actually see neo-Nazi posts routinely - but they're clearly less banned from using the platform to communicate than my attempts to sell used sports equipment are. And I honestly wouldn't care if Facebook left their page in peace in the name of free speech and diversity of opinions, but then at least have the decency to tell me why I can't post on the marketplace. Like I said - it's the claim that they police content - it only inconveniences and confuses people instead of actually getting rid of bad content.
- Const-me 9y ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
- tim333 9y ago
  I just checked and they seem to have made it easier. Click the "..." at the top right of the post, click 'Give Feedback', click 'hate speech' or whatever.
gfosco 9y ago
Humans make the decisions, and humans make mistakes.. Humans don't always "get" all the context for every issue. Do you really expect perfection for every judgment? There are anecdotes for every scenario, and they don't accurately portray the general case or the intent.
- xg15 9y ago
  Ok, so then what? We should tolerate a certain number of bullying groups and casualties for the greater good?
  - gfosco 9y ago
    What's the alternative? Can you go on Twitter and find bullying? Can you go on Reddit and find bullying? Is there any internet property where moderation is 100% perfect?
    - wukerplank 9y ago
      Examples that are equally bad should not set the bar, right? Nothing gets better by doing that.
      - gfosco 9y ago
        Is there a better example? Is the concept of perfect moderation even theoretically possible?
        Const-me 9y ago
        > Is there a better example? No one is perfect, but I think Reddit is better. At least they are transparent, i.e. unlike Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter they aren’t afraid to talk to journalists about their content filtering: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...
  - 9y ago
Tomte 9y ago
I have never seen any other reaction, the few times I‘ve actually reported posts. They even soften it with something along the lines of „you were right to report it, but...“
pjc50 9y ago
There are plenty of things that Facebook can definitely get rid of seemingly every time: spam (advertising you've not paid for), female nipples (breastfeeding controversy passim), competing social networks ( https://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-social-network/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-soc... ) and so on. Hate speech is just not a priority in the way spam is.
- narrator 9y ago
  Getting rid of nipples is easy with a deep neural net pornography image recognizer. I think the guys at Facebook don't want to deal with the exceptions so they just don't and say oops, community guidelines.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I'm not sure I believe that, but if so, why is a neural network hate speech recogniser so much harder, then?
    - throwaway84742 9y ago
      Because properly understanding speech requires sophisticated cognition. No one has any clue whatsoever how to solve that. And political speech is one of the more difficult domains in NLP due to prevalence of innuendo, sarcasm, and non-sequiturs.
    - ryan_j_naughton 9y ago
      Because hate speech involves understanding intent. In the case of breasts/nipples, they can have a blanket rule against it. Thus even an artistic image with breasts would be removed (not just pornography). If they did that with speech, then they would censor an insane amount of sarcastic speech as well. The false positive rate would be really high and that would be a chilling effect on speech. Similarly, the actual hate speech would find ways to use new coded terms and nuance to get around the filters. Imagine if instead of "no female nipples" they had a policy of no overly sexual images. That would be way more subjective and harder to enforce. My bet is that is the case with text based speech.
bmarquez 9y ago
I once reported a group named "Assassinate Donald Trump" and got a similar "doesn't violate their community standards" generic message. I wonder what is the threshold for reports before an actual human looks at them, or what keywords will get Facebook's attention. Perhaps a bunch of people need to report simultaneously.
throwaway84742 9y ago
Should have told them the community had conservatives posting in it. It would be banned in record time. I’m only partly joking.
- jamespo 9y ago
  This happened to my “snowflakes for trump” group
dahdum 9y ago
I checked the pic, is your friend the Russian political blogger / Putin critic with virtually the same name who writes about conspiracies? If not, maybe just a case of mistaken identity. If it was him, maybe he fell under some clause of notable persons. I don't know what the content was like of course, but that could be one reason they didn't immediately delete. Did they eventually remove or did the creator shut it down?
- Const-me 9y ago
  > is your friend the Russian political blogger / Putin critic with virtually the same name Yes, he is. > who writes about conspiracies No, he doesn’t. He’s an investment banker, and he mostly blogs about the consequences of Putin’s external politics (i.e. the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Syria) for Russian economy. > Did they eventually remove or did the creator shut it down? I don’t know what happened to that group.

abawany 9y ago

Facebook made it deliberately difficult and obfuscated to report violations as well. Twitter by comparison makes it relatively frictionless. I don't use Facebook except to follow some news sources but I now follow them on Twitter and barely use Facebook. I know one is supposed to assume incompetence where malice is seen but gosh, I can't decide where Facebook falls yet.

m52go 9y ago
I think the point the parent is making is that standards are being applied unevenly. On Twitter, for example, there are a host of accounts that have been banned for seemingly harmless activity while other accounts with much more serious issues remain active. Despite it being easier to report violations on Twitter (taking your word for it...I have no personal experience), standards aren't being applied fairly. That undermines the whole point of standards.
TallGuyShort 9y ago
Facebook is notorious from both ends of this, it seems. I've had a Facebook marketplace post taken down with no explanation other than a copy of the guidelines, I appealed, and now my marketplace posts simply don't get seen by other people, even if they search for them. I've had a friend's account get suspended for a meme that pissed some people off, while a legit neo-Nazi group that had Swastikas on the page I had reported months earlier for making comments about the extinction of the pure white race was still up. It seems they only police enough to claim they do. They don't actually do much that anyone is happy with.
- tim333 9y ago
  You'd think something like a simple downvote button that lowers the probability of the post being seen would kinda work.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    I would think that's ripe for abuse. For curating my personal feed, I've been fairly content to unfollow people I want to remain friends with and hide posts shared from specific accounts. I don't actually see neo-Nazi posts routinely - but they're clearly less banned from using the platform to communicate than my attempts to sell used sports equipment are. And I honestly wouldn't care if Facebook left their page in peace in the name of free speech and diversity of opinions, but then at least have the decency to tell me why I can't post on the marketplace. Like I said - it's the claim that they police content - it only inconveniences and confuses people instead of actually getting rid of bad content.
Const-me 9y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
tim333 9y ago
I just checked and they seem to have made it easier. Click the "..." at the top right of the post, click 'Give Feedback', click 'hate speech' or whatever.

gfosco 9y ago

Humans make the decisions, and humans make mistakes.. Humans don't always "get" all the context for every issue. Do you really expect perfection for every judgment? There are anecdotes for every scenario, and they don't accurately portray the general case or the intent.

xg15 9y ago
Ok, so then what? We should tolerate a certain number of bullying groups and casualties for the greater good?
- gfosco 9y ago
  What's the alternative? Can you go on Twitter and find bullying? Can you go on Reddit and find bullying? Is there any internet property where moderation is 100% perfect?
  - wukerplank 9y ago
    Examples that are equally bad should not set the bar, right? Nothing gets better by doing that.
    - gfosco 9y ago
      Is there a better example? Is the concept of perfect moderation even theoretically possible?
      - Const-me 9y ago
        > Is there a better example? No one is perfect, but I think Reddit is better. At least they are transparent, i.e. unlike Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter they aren’t afraid to talk to journalists about their content filtering: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...
- 9y ago

Tomte 9y ago

I have never seen any other reaction, the few times I‘ve actually reported posts. They even soften it with something along the lines of „you were right to report it, but...“

pjc50 9y ago

There are plenty of things that Facebook can definitely get rid of seemingly every time: spam (advertising you've not paid for), female nipples (breastfeeding controversy passim), competing social networks ( https://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-social-network/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/facebook-banning-tsu-rival-soc... ) and so on. Hate speech is just not a priority in the way spam is.

narrator 9y ago
Getting rid of nipples is easy with a deep neural net pornography image recognizer. I think the guys at Facebook don't want to deal with the exceptions so they just don't and say oops, community guidelines.
- pjc50 9y ago
  I'm not sure I believe that, but if so, why is a neural network hate speech recogniser so much harder, then?
  - throwaway84742 9y ago
    Because properly understanding speech requires sophisticated cognition. No one has any clue whatsoever how to solve that. And political speech is one of the more difficult domains in NLP due to prevalence of innuendo, sarcasm, and non-sequiturs.
  - ryan_j_naughton 9y ago
    Because hate speech involves understanding intent. In the case of breasts/nipples, they can have a blanket rule against it. Thus even an artistic image with breasts would be removed (not just pornography). If they did that with speech, then they would censor an insane amount of sarcastic speech as well. The false positive rate would be really high and that would be a chilling effect on speech. Similarly, the actual hate speech would find ways to use new coded terms and nuance to get around the filters. Imagine if instead of "no female nipples" they had a policy of no overly sexual images. That would be way more subjective and harder to enforce. My bet is that is the case with text based speech.

bmarquez 9y ago

I once reported a group named "Assassinate Donald Trump" and got a similar "doesn't violate their community standards" generic message. I wonder what is the threshold for reports before an actual human looks at them, or what keywords will get Facebook's attention. Perhaps a bunch of people need to report simultaneously.

throwaway84742 9y ago

Should have told them the community had conservatives posting in it. It would be banned in record time. I’m only partly joking.

jamespo 9y ago
This happened to my “snowflakes for trump” group

dahdum 9y ago

I checked the pic, is your friend the Russian political blogger / Putin critic with virtually the same name who writes about conspiracies? If not, maybe just a case of mistaken identity. If it was him, maybe he fell under some clause of notable persons. I don't know what the content was like of course, but that could be one reason they didn't immediately delete. Did they eventually remove or did the creator shut it down?

Const-me 9y ago
> is your friend the Russian political blogger / Putin critic with virtually the same name Yes, he is. > who writes about conspiracies No, he doesn’t. He’s an investment banker, and he mostly blogs about the consequences of Putin’s external politics (i.e. the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Syria) for Russian economy. > Did they eventually remove or did the creator shut it down? I don’t know what happened to that group.